Design Isn’t Visual
I’ve noticed a disturbing trend among average designers that keeps them just that – average. The trend has been to focus design time on everything visual, to make the website as pretty, cool or as visually appealing as possible.
While it’s certainly important for a website to be visually appealing, real design isn’t really visual – it’s communicative. Real design tells a story and focuses on subconscious cues from the visitor.
When average designers get a new design project, what sort of questions do they ask the client?
- Can you give me 5 sites that have a design you like?
- What colors are you going for?
- What sort of design elements do you like?
As you can see, these questions all deal with one thing – visuals. When I was in design school, the school focused on old-school print design principles. We studied for weeks the way the best designers approached their projects, and almost none of them had to do with what the client wanted it to look like.
Instead, these designers focused on the target audience and who they were.
- What did certain colors mean to this audience and how would it affect the view of the company?
- How old is this audience and what did they like? What does the negative space of the piece say and how does the content flow?
- How should the audience feel?
- What message is the company trying to convey?
As you can see, all of these do affect the visual design itself, but none of them are about the actual visuals. They’re about the way the piece communicates with the audience.
I think that thanks to the ease of the Internet and tools like Photoshop, there’s been a huge influx of both rookie designers with no training and clients with little to no budgets. This makes the brainstorming process tougher and in some cases, non-existent.
Good designers don’t start with design. They go through a full process of several steps that include research before they even touch a computer. The full design process should look like:
- Research of company
- Research of target audience
- Brainstorming/free-flowing exercises
- Sketches
- First comps
- Second comps, etc
How often do you see today’s web designers do anything but the comps? How much do you think their design suffers because of it?
When Steve Jobs left Apple and went on to found NeXt, he hired one of the best logo designers ever – Paul Rand. Here’s what Job’s said about Rand:
“I asked him if he would come up with a few options. And he said, “No. I will solve your problem for you. And you will pay me. And you don’t have to use the solution. If you want options, go talk to other people. But I’ll solve your problem for you the best way I know how. And you use it or not. That’s up to you. You’re the client. But you pay me.” And there was a clarity about the relationship that was refreshing.”
While we probably aren’t famous enough to respond as bluntly as Rand did, we can learn an important lesson from him. Clients come to us for our expertise, so why do we rely on them or allow them to push us in the direction the design should go?
Your thoughts
Have you noticed a decline in the quality of design? Do you think today’s design is based too much on the visual aspect?
image by Kapungo
About the author
Amber Weinberg specializes in clean and semantic XHTML, CSS and WordPress development. She has over 10 years of coding experience and is pretty cool to work with. Amber is available for freelance work, so why not hire her for your next project?
A lot of what you’ve mentioned here is actually a hot topic of debate in the design community – what is the role of a designer? Are we strategic thinkers or simply window dressers? Designers who only look at the visual elements of the design process are neglecting opportunities to improve the effectiveness, impact, and sheer creativity of a project. And this ultimately gives the project a longer lasting value for the client.
I know, it’s always been a debate since web design became mainstream. I miss the great print designers of the 20th century
Agreed! We still have some great print designers in this day and age but they’re obscured by all of the rising and flashy talent
Well said! When potential clients start telling me how they want their site to look, I cringe. Then, I educate them on our process and why we do things the way we do. Sometimes they hire us, and sometimes they move on to a glorified Photoshop-owner to whom they can dictate design ideas.
Thankfully, this industry is maturing. The truly great web firms do the hard work of laying out a business case for any content or design element before using it on the site.
You made the key point in the article that a lot of designers aren’t in a position to be as bold as to disregard direct visual instructions from a client. After all, it is the client paying the money so if they aren’t going to let you do what they are actually paying you for then that’s their mistake. It’s the designers choice to go along with it and get their true creative fix somewhere else or maintain their artistic integrity and part ways.
Technically you are right and wrong. Clients pay us to design because WE’RE the designers, not because we’re pixel pushers. The problem is, lower-end designers have perpetuated the idea of pixel pushing, so clients have come to expect it. Kinda the same thing with spec work too.
I see it like coding. There are back end coders and there are front end coders. Within each of those there are more sub-categories like PHP and ASPX coders or Javascipt and CSS coders. Some coders can do more than 1 thing but not many excel in all of the areas. Design is the same way, at least to me, a coder. There are UI architects, navigation experts, visual enhancers, branding creators, etc. Its our job to inform the client about what solutions are available to their problems, who should handle them and our best recommendations.
That’s a good point. I guess some deisgners are just “prettiers” while others are what makes the big brands so big
In my experience dealing with clients I see it as they’re mainly focused on the visual and it’s hard to get them to put more thought into what they’re asking for. It turns into a guessing game and it becomes a daunting task for the designer. When clients are cooperative and they realize they’ve hired you for your expertise things can really flow and both the designer and client are happy in the end but it’s really difficult to stand up to a difficult client sometimes.
In short… I concur.
*Favourite Amber Weinberg article yet*
i have to agree – i am currently going through the same thing. all they want is to look like this site or that site. I keep asking them what is their audience who are you trying to reach. I get a blank stare and then ‘we like this site here’…. really quite painful.
.mike
too true. good article, interesting thoughts. even just graduated i have experienced this thing a lot. clients say “these are the colors, this is the font, make it look like ______.” i just want to say, “hey, im the designer, let me DESIGN this for you. or you can get someone else to be your slave.” but i need the money, so i dont…
I try not to look too deep into the design process, it would just simply complicate things more than they need to be. I find it is much easier to just jump right into Photoshop and get my hands dirty and just take my direction from client feedback. There is no time for research! But I don’t really consider myself a high end designer, I’m more of a developer, I just design because most clients are cheap as hell so I can’t even outsource the design to a dedicated designer or there will be no money in my pocket.
See but not doing the research means the client only gets some meaningless “pretty” design. You’d be amazed at how much research and brainstorming went into things like Chick-Fila’s Cow campaign.
Great style may be great to some, but to others, it’s rubbish. Trust us, we now have suffered our share of differing beliefs on our own design work…